In Cixin Liu's "The Dark Forest," the second book in the Chinese sci-fi writer's "The Three-Body Problem" series, an alien says that it is puzzled by the fact that humans do not regard "think" and "say" as synonyms. The aliens' thoughts are immediately discernible to each other, so they do not have a need to "say" anything. For them, speaking and thinking are the same. Humans are different because we cannot read each other's thoughts and may choose to not speak about what they are thinking. So, for humans, speaking and thinking are different, but what about words and thoughts?

Your New Year's treat is a short story that seems appropriate, given the growing popularity (and fear) about the new image and language generating AIs, such as ChatGPT and DALL-e. Even I can't get that earworm out of my head. It's drives me crazy, but you can't help but love it. Despite his words, Rory didn't look scared, in fact he gloated, a sneer across his lips, as he leaned back in his chair, took a drag on his cigar, and released the smoke in a slow stream to join the white mist hanging in a cloud above the desk separating him and his partner, David. "This is gonna change the music world, maybe even go beyond that." "I never would have said it would work, but damn if it didn't. Musicman put together a song that went right to the top of the charts. No one can stop humming it. Once it was on the internet, and our response bots started with the likes and the shares, it took off like a California wildfire."

Has AI made Creativity a Thing of the Past? Recently, there has been an avalanche of interest in generative AI: programs that can produce text, speech, images, designs, music, and even computer code in an uncanny resemblance to human creations. AI systems, such as GPT-3, which mostly produces text, but can also produce images and computer code, or Dall-E, Stable Diffusion, or Midjourney, which produce images, are the tip of the iceberg in an expanding field that is attracting millions of users and billions of dollars in investments. The outputs of these systems can rival the quality of human products and work faster and cheaper than human writers, artists, and composers. Industries such as animated images for television and film are choosing AI artists over human ones to save time and money.

This week, Elon Musk unveiled, "Optimus," Tesla's humanoid robot. Most of the demonstration of Optimus' abilities was via videos of his performance in laboratory conditions. Live, on stage, he merely stood still and waved his arms. Musk joked that he didn't want the robot to do anything more in front of the audience because he might "fall on his face." Perhaps the most impressive thing about the robot was that it had a human-like, five-fingered hand and a human-shaped head, so, except for the metal and wires, it did resemble a human.